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Imagine: You are home or in a secluded cabin. A weapon-wielding psycho killer is stalking his way through your house. He’s in the kitchen or the study. What do you do? Knock over a bookshelf to create a barrier and buy yourself time? Throw some of those heavy art objects your mom bought on vacation at him? Distract him with Halloween candy? Head straight out the front door?

By Kellie Schorr

 

Dharma in the Dark is a six-article series exploring how horror movie tropes and clichés can show us some life basics found in Buddhist teachings.

The Girl Who Runs Up The Stairs

I grew up in the ’80s, where slasher movies were everywhere. Whether it was midnight movies or Saturday matinees, watching slasher flicks was as much a part of teen life as mixtapes and going to the mall. The girls in those movies had big dreams, bigger hair, and, when faced with a terrifying situation, the tendency to make bafflingly poor decisions.

Imagine: You are home or in a secluded cabin. A weapon-wielding psycho killer is stalking his way through your house. He’s in the kitchen or the study. What do you do? Knock over a bookshelf to create a barrier and buy yourself time? Throw some of those heavy art objects your mom bought on vacation at him? Distract him with Halloween candy? Head straight out the front door?

No.

In a pure moment of genius, you decide to… run up the stairs.

Now you’re trapped with limited space, sharp hallway corners, and no safe exit. You can’t go out the window because you’ll either fall to your death or get killed by the stalker. While it is true that almost all good horror stories begin with a bad decision, running up the stairs is one of the worst.

Not only do you confine yourself to smaller quarters and lose access to a bunch of easy exits, but you also expend more energy going up the stairs. At a time when you need all the strength you can get, you challenge your body with more exercise!

Most importantly, the act shows that you are operating in panic mode—reacting reflexively, not strategically. The killer, by contrast, keeps his cool and methodically goes about his plan, because your reactive chaos makes you predictable.

By trying to come up with a clever solution, we often make the whole situation worse.

Overthinking

In the same way the panicked girl in a horror movie runs upstairs instead of heading for the front door, we often react to fear or uncertainty in our own lives with complex, knee-jerk strategies that only trap us further. Whether it’s a personal crisis or a national challenge, our fight-or-flight instincts cloud our judgment, leading us to make hasty choices that escalate the problem.

In the U.S., our nation is struggling with divisive and painful political decisions that hurt so many people. Civil rights, LGBTQ equality, women’s autonomy, environmental stability and financial security are all endangered by oligarchy and the oppressive force of Christian nationalism.

Becoming second-class citizens in our own country is stalking many of us with more vengeance than Jason Voorhees in a red, white, and blue hockey mask.

In our distress, we overcomplicate our responses, funneling our indignation and fear into huge conspiracies or ALL CAPS internet dramas. We engage in endless debates about policy details, while others retreat into echo chambers that offer comfort but no progress.

Caught in this loop of overthinking, we find ourselves running up a set of metaphorical stairs that lead nowhere, as if thinking harder or screaming louder will somehow make an answer appear. Paralyzed by the scale of the threat and how powerless we feel, it becomes easy to lose hope.

What if, instead of rushing headlong up the stairs, we paused, became aware of our surroundings, and took the simpler, more personal path?

The Prayer of Shantideva

In The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryāvatāra), Shantideva offers a better answer. Instead of worrying that we can’t change the government, the church, or the media, we find ourselves taking the smallest, most direct step possible. Instead of running up the stairs trying to figure out how to change a national crisis, we start every day with this prayer and extend it to the people closest to us:

The Prayer of Shantideva
(from Bodhicaryāvatāra by Shantideva)

“May I be a protector for those without protection,
A guide for those who journey,
A boat, a shelter, a servant to all who are in need.
May I be a lamp for those who do not have light,
A bed for those who seek rest,
And a servant for all who may desire it.
May I be the medicine and the physician
For all sick beings in the world,
Until everyone is healed.
May I be a wish-fulfilling jewel,
A vase of plenty,
A tree of miracles,
And a cow of plenty for all beings.
May I be the ground that supports all beings,
And the way to enlightenment for those who seek it.
May I be the great river of liberation,
Leading all beings to the shore of freedom.”

Protect, Shelter, Listen, Heal

You don’t have to stop a raging river. You can be a boat that helps someone across it. You don’t have to change the world. You just need to show up and make a difference where you can. The more individual people we help with our presence and generosity, the more we can challenge those who want to sentence us to cold darkness, then charge us money for the warmth of the sun.

When we hear the stalker’s footsteps in our house (or the White House), together (it’s a horror show out there—don’t split up!), bridge by bridge, light to light, we can walk out the front door to freedom.

 

Authors note:  Horror can teach messages such things as living with grief (The Babadook, Hereditary, Don’t Look Now), dealing with family trauma (The Haunting of Hill House, The Witch,  The Invisible Man [2020]), the reality of systemic racism (Get Out, Us, Nope), the harm from fanatical devotion to religious certainty (The Mist, Heretic, The Wicker Man [1973]) or the horror women endure in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty (The Substance, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Death Becomes Her).

Is there a movie you’d like an article about?  Let me know at KellieSchorr.com

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

Were you inspired by this? You may also like:

The Dharma of a Pendulum

We vs. They Can No Longer Work.

 

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